Endeavour Drinks

Exploring product adjacencies for future business opportunities | 2023

The challenge

Endeavour Group operates Australia’s largest retail drinks network and portfolio of licensed hotels. The Australian liquor industry is currently grappling with a multifaceted set of challenges, with one of the most pressing being changes in consumer preferences and behaviour.

By 2030, the largest share of customers will be Millennials and Gen Z, who are demonstrating a growing trend towards health consciousness and moderation. This shift has led to a decline in traditional alcohol consumption.

Our goal

To explore alternative brands, adjacent to retail drinks, to determine viability of new online opportunities for future strategic revenue streams enabled by new technology platforms.

The endeavourX strategy was being formulated including developing infrastructure and capability for the future. With new technology of Unified Digital Transformation (Unified Commerce via Salesforce, AEM, OMS) Endeavour will have the right platforms in place to allow them to scale and grow, and leverage the infrastructure to establish new business and revenue opportunities.

This design challenge presented the opportunity to create some examples of what could be future possibilities that could be enabled by the new platform.

Under direction from the GM of Digital, we focussed on three eComm businesses:

1. Fully Functional: an eCom business specialising in functional beverages, tonics, and other products (gummies, chews, capsules) that deliver functional benefits. Future: CBD & THC.

2. Family Thirst: an eComm drinks destination that provides for the end-to-end drinks needs of the entire family. Bulk buying to stock up the pantry and fridge with quality beverages at value prices.

3. Barrel & Flame: A specialist whisky store that is merchandised around the whisky experience, and selling adjacent products e.g. glassware, cigars, humidors.

The bigger picture goal (or ulterior motive)

“Look ahead for the game plan” ~ Steve Cuda, GM Endeavour X

• To demonstrate that we have the in-house skills and capabilities within our design practice to elevate our brands above best-in-class Vivino rather than taking blue-sky thinking and strategic design to outside agencies.

• To demonstrate the potential power of a unified front-end: 95% similar functionality and UX across brands, with their own visual identity and personality treatments.

What we did

Skunkworks style, sponsored, time bound and autonomous

We approached the challenge as a skunkworks project - an innovative undertaking, involving a small group of people, that is outside the normal research and development (R&D) channels within an organisation. Through an expression of interest, a small team of UX, UI and CRO was gathered, and self-organised into 3 groups each tackling one of the design challenges.

Portfolio approach

We first validated that the Endeavour opportunities needed to be:

• Sizeable and scalable

  • Is the market large enough to tackle?

  • Is it a customer problem? Connect to customer centricity:  behaviours, attitudes and shopping habits

  • Potential as a scalable solution?

• Aligned to ‘our right to play’

  • Does it leverage the Endeavour unfair advantage (what we famous for)?

    • Beverage fulfilment, compliance and regulation, established buying networks, unparalleled scale, digital retailer, brand love + trust in market, 360 view of customer, own the fridge / cellar.

• Actionable

  • We are confident we can deliver and scale.

  • We have the ability to execute well on signature moments for customer, and business operations.

Research, exploration & ideation

• Defined the customer problem to be solved and the unmet need

• Explored potential market opportunity and value in Australia

• Sought to understand our Endeavour advantage that gave us the right to play in the space

• Conducted competitor analysis to see what others are doing, what can we do better, and identify gaps in the market

• Defined our Customer archetypes - their needs, values, motivators and jobs to be done*

• Created Brand vision, mission, position, personality and pillars*

• Developed inspirational moodboards, brand personality and visual language

• Designed mobile screens for key pages in the customer journey including homepage, category listings and product details

• Determined how each of these could be developed using a multi-brand design system and unified-front end.*

My role

Skunkworks Project Lead:

• Leading all aspects of the initiative from initial brief through to final presentations to endeavourX leadership team and Endeavour Group executive leadership team including CEO and Chief Strategy Officer

• Consultation with General Manager, Design Practice Lead and other stakeholders

• Managed time lines, milestones, deliverables and ways of working

• Recruited a small team of passionate designers including 3x UI, 2x UX, 1x CRO specialist and leveraged past Service Design research. The team was a blend of seniors and mids, and they stretched beyond the usual constraints of their job description to try their hand at new activities

• *Defined all customer archetypes, brand development and connected the work to the big-picture goals, to present a case for unified-front end and multi-brand design system.

Brand concept explorations

‘Family Thirst’ and ‘Barrel & Flame’ were brand concepts developed by other participants in the Skunkworks team.

Fully Functional

I partnered with Nicola Winter, a Senior UX Designer, to focus on an eCom business specialising in functional beverages, tonics, and other products (gummies, chews, capsules) that deliver functional benefits including Physical performance, Energy/hydration, Alertness/Cognitive Benefits (nootropics), Hangover, Gut/Health Benefits, Zero Sugar / Low Cal, Dietary requirements (collagen/pregnancy), Micro-dosing (caffeine, nicotine). Our future view was the potential legalisation of CBD and THC – a market with large revenue opportunities.

Our discovery and design explored the following:

• Our Endeavour unfair advantage:

  • We are the drinks experts, deliver on “Drink better”

  • We know regulation & Customer ID

  • We can tailor fulfilment options with Centralised Centres, packaging & social responsibility.

  • We are a large scale digital retailer & speak to health goals.

  Competitor analysis and the gap in the market:

  • There is nobody in Australia, bringing all these brands together in a single online retail environment that brings credibility and category expertise

  • Current brands lead with product first. The gap to address is to talk to the outcome/ benefit.

• Defined customer archetypes, meeting the their health goals with convenience and privacy

• Created Brand vision, mission, position, personality and pillars:

  • We aspire to be the guiding light in the realm of cognitive wellness and holistic well-being.
    Our commitment is to help individuals reach their true potential, through premium and science-backed products. We prioritise safety, trust and satisfaction above all else.

• Developed inspirational moodboards, brand personality and visual language

• Designed mobile screens for key pages in the customer journey including homepage, category listings and product details.

Outcomes

• In two weeks we exceeded expectations and developed 3 new brand concepts, with clear value propositions, backed by market research

• Elevated our Voice of Team engagement metric – deep engagement of the designers who thrived with the opportunity to challenge themselves, to collaborate and work on something that was creative, strategic, fun, meaningful to them and of real value to the customer and the business

• Demonstrated a clear case to Exco of the power and potential of investing in a unified-front end and multi-brand design system

• This led to the formation of the Unified Commerce product mission, focussed on delivering the platform migration to support unified systems (payments, personalisation, fulfilment etc)

• Unified front-end and multi-brand design system commenced in January 2024

• These brand concepts remain as examples for the future-state vision: With a unified commerce platform and a multi-brand design system driving the future front end + CX, the possibility to bring these kind of digital retail experiences to life becomes a reality.

“You demonstrated what could be achieved in two weeks. Imagine what could be done if design was unleashed on our core brands!” ~ Steve Cuda, GM Endeavour X